is Cicero denouncing Catiline.

As such it is not for your imitation. Burke happened to be a genius, with
a swoop and range of mind, as of language to interpret it, with a gift to
enchant, a power to strike and astound, which together make him, to my
thinking, the man in our literature most nearly comparable with
Shakespeare. Others may be more to your taste; you may love others
better: but no other two leave you so hopeless of discovering _how it is
done_. Yet not for this reason only would I warn you against imitating
either. For like all great artists they accepted their conditions and
wrought for them, and those conditions have changed. When Jacques wished
to recite to an Elizabethan audience that

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players--

or Hamlet to soliloquise

To be, or not to be: that is the question--

the one did not stretch himself under a property oak, nor did the other
cast himself back in a chair and dangle his legs. They both advanced
boldly from the stage, down a narrow platform provided for such
recitations and for that purpose built boldly forward into the
auditorium, struck an attitude, declaimed the purple passage, and
returned, covered with applause, to continue the action of the play. This
was the theatrical convention; this the audience expected and understood;
for this Shakespeare wrote. Similarly, though the device must have been
wearing thin even in 1795-6, Burke cast a familiar epistle into language
proper to be addressed to Mr Speaker of the House of Commons. Shakespeare